I thought we could eat some late supper in the Alhambra as it was our next stop.

The Throne was tasked with marking currencies used in Alhambra region stored in Treasury for easy retrieval.

Another teleport later we were greeted with sun shining on the sky with utmost glee.

I decided on skipping the city gates and appearing directly in the city center.

All of the buildings here were white, like those in some Mediterranean cities. Roof were not inclined like those in Ythall and almost every elevation was shaded with colorful awnings. It suggested that snow rarely fell here.

There was some shrubbery and trees planted here and there. I have quickly located the building covered in grapevine. It was an establishment of the wine merchant Al Rurki according to MiniMap.

We entered the premises after taking our masks off. The inside was less arabic than I thought it would be. The furniture was normal except everything down to little knickknacks was decorated with wine motifs.

- Esteemed customers, how can I help you?

He said and frowned deeply.

- Is that gal a slave? It certainly looks like a slave collar she is wearing.

- Yes she is. Are you another bastard that refuses to trade with a slave.

That took the merchant aback. It was more of a displeasure due to inconvenience than rage that caused this outburst. I have grown a little numb to how various people treated slaves in Ythall. I guess it was not that different half a globe away from Velia. Thankfully Elfin never swallowed the Language orb.

- Slavery is outlawed in the Lands of Alhambra, stranger.

- Oh. Sorry for my rude tone then. I misunderstood your intentions completely.

I felt my cuff being pulled a little.

- What are you talking about, master? Is there some problem or danger?

- He just said there are no slaves here.

I decided to test her resolve and loyalty in a cruel way.

- If you were to call a guard I would get arrested and you would be freed. It is definitely the best chance you would get at freeing yourself. Otherwise we should wrap some clothes around your neck to hide that collar – I finished and offered her my own cloak.

I let go of her hand I was holding previously.

Blue or red. What will you choose, little elf?

To my surprise she did not even hesitate and took and donned the cloak on.

I petted her on the head and smiled. Then I turned to the Al Rurki.

- Will you serve us or call the guards on us?

- I do not wish for trouble, stranger. I will serve you and then ask you to leave immediately. What kind of grape juice do you seek?

- Alcoholic, fermented kind, of course.

- That is the only kind we have!

- Splendid. Do you have the one foreigners call Alhambra?

He sighed.

- No one in all of Alhambra would call any wine that way. Although I know what kind of beverage it actually is. Would you like to sample it?

- Sure, if you would be so kind.

He proceeded to pick one of the bottles lying in the marble basin filled with water and ice. It must have been magically conjured ice!

The wine was poured into a genuine glass. So far everything I drank from on Thrope was wooden or more rarely some cheap metal. This merchant must be really prosperous.

I accepted the wine glass and sipped some.

- Utterly disgusting. We will have two barrels and a dozen bottles.

- So much! Regardless of your distaste.

I handed the mostly full glass to Elfin.

- Drink it if you want.

She started slowly sipping it, but never stopped until it was empty. Droplets collected on the sides of the glass. “Tears of wine” signified it was a full-bodied one.

- I am more of a sweet wine person myself. This bitter purchase is for a friend.

- Would you like to also sample a few sweet wines? This time I would give you high class ones.

- Huh? Alhambra is not high class?

- Well, it is the cheapest wine this establishment carries.

- Bizarre!

In the end we left the shop with so much merchandise that I had no other choice, but to open Storage in front of the Al. In total we have spent almost a small gold on all the wine.

Also it turned out that Al was a name and not some title. Short for Alfred actually.

Elfin liked both bitter and sweet drinks, but that lack of preference was because it was her first time drinking anything alcoholic other than some cheap medicines.

I got advice on how to present the gift the best. We would need a small silk pillow to complete it.

We went back onto the streets, bought snacks, a pillow and a mask. Mask face was depicting some kind of red bird. It looked a little bit like a sparrow.

It was an appropriate gift for the maid, sorry I mean queen. Is it too late to respect her? Only after seeing her naughty bits twice she kind of lost all the splendor and royalty. I am really not suited for monarchy and all that feudal business.

The Queen’s Bedchambers were surprisingly still empty. Her dot showed few rooms away in some kind of study with few others. She was working at such an hour?

I gestured to Elfin to be quiet and arranged two crossed bottles on the bed. A pillow underneath them and red bird mask above them.

Something was still missing.

Maybe a letter of invitation?

Nah.

Letter were not mysterious enough.

What would be good as a sign of goodwill and acceptance from Dark Rose Society? Let’s ask our field reporter, Elfin, the Half-Elf.

- Maybe give Her Majesty a black rose? All noble women should like flowers. Though I do not know if such roses exist.

She continued to mutter something like “I like getting flowers, too, I think.”, but it is not like I would be able to heat something you mutter so quietly. I am not some superhuman god with superhearing, the Epic Earman. Only a small world god with a vessel brimming with Divinity, you know.

She was starting to look inebriated. I gave her some snacks to munch on instead of flowers.

Returning to more pressing problems through the almighty Throne Reality Search Engine™ I have quickly found several dark or black roses. All were poisonous in some way. Most of them deadly so.

Splendid.

I relayed the information to my drunk slave.

- Master Lynx Demon, maybe we should paint the ordinary red rose black.

- Good idea, but not mysterious enough. We could use a black dye, but it takes time to soak in and I never tried it before.

I caught my chin between my thumb and forefinger.

- Maybe make an artificial rose with other materials like sewn cloth?

- Too tiresome and we do not have enough time to do the embroidery. Alas, it has given me an idea. If we cannot get a real rose, a fake one would do. That means using CGI.

Incomprehension could be clearly seen radiating from her face.

- Seegee’ai?

- Sorry, old speech habits die hard-ly ever. I meant illusion spells!

And it turns out it was easier said than done. Learning illusion magic. That is if you were a mortal mage. Few clicks later I was creating a copy of the 3D image provided by the Throne.

<Throne System Notice: Administrator Lynx has gained a new school of magic: Illusion Magic>

<Throne System Notice: Administrator Lynx has gained a new spell: Imagery LVL 1>

The rose was ready.

My cute slave could not hold herself and tried to grab the dark illusory rose.

In the end her hand went through and the illusion dispersed into several motes of light. It was caused due to inherent mana field of most living organisms. This effect was such a nice and more important - free addition!

The gift was now well prepared, I dare say.

I wondered briefly whether to add some rose scent to the pillow, but it was too troublesome.

The two culprits vanished into the thin air.

 

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Elfin was sleeping soundly after eating some light snacks and downing almost full glass of wine. She fell asleep on my lap. I stroked her head gently. She was quite clingy this night. It was not a bad thing, not at all. I felt something stirring inside my cold heart, but quickly killed the thought.

On the other hand I was still so full of energy. As I have expected. My biorhythm became estranged with the day and night cycle.

So I downloaded latest bestsellers on healing magic and started going through them.

The goal was to find the quickest and safest method of healing my lovely half-elf.

Indeed.

The field of healing magic is truly profound.

Normal spells could not recover the missing live matter.

If you forced a limb to regrow it would be at the cost of other parts of the body.

Of course magicians would never be stopped by such a silly problem. There were countless ways of getting around this issue.

Simplest was to re-attach severed limb. This idea had 0% Elfin’s case compatibility. The limb was burned and then surgically cut off so long ago. It had probably rotted away already.

On the other hand the hand from the thief that tried to rob those dwarves at the gates could probably be re-attached quite easily.

Secondly it was not written in any of the basic manuals, but slaughtering a few chickens could also do the trick. Their chemical elements of primarily oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphor would be used to recreate muscles and bones of the wounded. Same with sourcing form any non-living or no longer living matter containing those.

It would be quite bloody and horrific, but it would work.

Thankfully there were still other methods to consider.

Of course any chemist would tell you that the most of the components of flesh were freely dispersed in the air. Calcium, phosphorous and other rarer elements were more tricky.

Then any experienced chemist would correct your thoughts. The amount of air needed would be staggering. Just to supply carbon for roughly a kilogram of flesh it would take almost 240 cubic meters of air. Hydrogen would have to come from water vapor, but unless one was in a very dry desert it would be less than the volume required for carbon.

The mana expenditure for moving and sorting such large mass was pretty impractical.

It could only be compared to the fourth method, which utilized school of creation magic. Basically creation magic dealt with making something out of nothing. To be more precise and exact matter was created from mana. Surprisingly there was no mention of creation of energy, but magic like light magic should already do that, right?

It was directly violating mass conservation law. Unless mana itself was a type of high-energy particles, but I intuitively disregarded such notion. Mana simply defied common sense in physics. This world and many living thing created mana on the spot.

Thus magic was a perpetuum mobile until proved otherwise.

The caveat of this method was how complicated it was itself on top of the inherent complexity of creation magic. Nevertheless it was what a mortal archmage would usually use if the Church priests could not be contacted.

I guess my half-guessed method with chickens was not widely spread. Though on the margin someone noted down a method of “rebirth from dragon” that used dragons instead of chickens.

Remember: There is always a bigger chicken!

Now, what really caught my interest was how priests of the Faith would go about healing the missing parts. Priest would learn normal healing spell like any mage would. Those spells were of the same effectiveness and only “stitched” the wounds without any creation of matter, limb restoration or the like.

The professional trick was to pray.

They prayed all night to get holy!

Holy magic used “holy mana”, which was an inaccurate name for mana speckled with minute quantities of Divinity supplied by the Heavens. Except this very knowledge was never written in those books. It was a taboo information for a reason. If mana was magical, divinity was divine or rather fantastical. It was like a higher order of mana. Elder mana?

Anyway. Point being that if you compared a mana particle to a brick, the divinity particle was like a modelling clay. More flexible, able to literally make miracles that were otherwise infeasible to achieve with normal magic.

For example healing a missing limb was easy.

Matter creation was much simpler. If necessary mana could also be created, though it would seem like a waste.

Creation of life was possible.

After all, all pure angels were created directly from divinity.

Becoming a demigod or even a god (albeit a lesser one without the Throne) was easy if you accumulated enough. Hopefully a priest of mine would not hoard granted divinity for such a purpose. Such a thing would be a waste of divinity combat potential. Priests were not fighters, nor were they particularly accomplished mages. Healing among angels was a standardized feature. An archmage in the domain of creation would be a better choice for such ascension into Heaven’s Army. Not that I had enough to spare right now.

Finally the divinity was very much compatible with the basic component of intent. No other components would normally be needed for most of divine or holy spells.

Main point of all of this research was that with the amount of divinity I had I could heal Elfin right now.

I got so excited I almost woke her up.

It was stupid. She was not like me and needed her beauty sleep.

An ugly bastard like me was already hopeless in this regard and thus required to only sleep once a week or so.

Just do not try it in real life, even if you are uglier than half-rotten trash. You might accidently off yourself. Unless you have required godhood like me, of course.

Besides it would be most prudent to test what was written in the books on a small wound like the gouged eye before tackling an entire arm.

I read the rest of the materials, while making notes in my magic journal as well as Throne GUI “digital” journal. Surprisingly my spell book was not updated with new spells, but the level of my Divine Magic went up.